Quvo - Cireco: Optimizing material recovery through LiDAR-based waste monitoring
Recycling plays a vital role in making our future more sustainable. The more materials are recycled, the fewer end up in landfills. Waste companies with material recovery facilities must comply with various regulations for the recycling process and are continually working to improve their operations and efficiency in recovering recyclable materials.
Cireco (Scotland) LLP, a leading company for complete resource management, works with volumetric measuring specialist Quvo Limited in deploying Blickfeld LiDAR sensors for waste monitoring. The automated volume monitoring solution provides the company with accurate data on the volume of waste stored in bunkers before sorting. The real-time data not only improves the utilization of the material recovery facility but also provides the accounting and the logistics departments with a reliable source of data to more easily comply with material storage regulations for safety and risk reasons.
Until now, Cireco relied primarily on the weighbridge data for waste monitoring, recording when the materials were delivered and dispatched. This data was combined with the experience of the experts in visual estimation for waste volume calculation to plan and control the capacity utilization of the sorting machine. Due to the frequent delivery and movement of waste between the storage boxes and the sorting machine, the piles were a constantly moving entity. Hence, deviations in the estimations of the actual quantity available for sorting were unavoidable. As a result, the total storage and plant capacity could not always be fully utilized.
Therefore, the goal was to enable a reliable on-demand waste monitoring through a digital solution to optimize the planning and utilization of the material recovery plant and the associated processes, such as logistics.
Three Blickfeld Cube 1 LiDAR sensors were mounted on the ceiling to cover the storage bunkers and detect the stored waste. Due to the large field of view, three devices were sufficient to cover the vast area.
The laser-based sensors continuously generate a live stream of 3D data. The associated perception software uses this data to calculate the volume of waste in the respective boxes down to the ton. Any change in the inventory becomes immediately visible. The data can also be accessed remotely, making on-site employee estimation obsolete.
Thanks to Blickfeld’s volume monitoring solution, the waste company now has on-demand access to a reliable data source for waste management. The accurate data enables Cireco to better forecast the resources in each bunker and leverage more storage capacity, leading to improved planning, utilization, and control of the material recovery facility.
Robin Baird, CEO of Cireco (Scotland) LLP, about LiDAR-based Volume Monitoring
In addition to the current installation at the materials recovery facility, further sensors are currently being installed at a second site. By expanding the sensor system, Cireco will be able to record inventory at multiple locations on demand and can thus further improve efficiency and accounting accuracy across sites.
